Out of the eight steps, discussed by Alex Castro of The Verge, on how Apple might demonstrate that it prioritises App Store consumers over profits a month ago it seems one of them is being implemented today. Apple now allows you to report a scammy app directly from the App Store listing using a new and enhanced version of its “Report a Problem” button.
Not only has the “Report a scam or fraud” button reappeared to individual app listings for the first time in years, but scam hunters Richard Mazkewich and Kosta Eleftheriou have also noted this on Twitter.
If you didn’t have iOS 15, you had to scroll the App Store’s Apps or Games section to find this option, which then sent you to an external page where you had to sign in again. After that, you have the option of choosing between “Report suspicious activity,” “Report a quality concern,” “Request a refund,” or “Find my content.” None of the choices provided a clear way to report a scam, and the “Report suspicious activity” would link you to Apple Support instead.
To make matters worse, Apple would only allow you to report “a quality concern” if you’d already paid for it in some way (and thus fallen for the scam).
The “Report a Problem” feature is now available in virtually every free app with in-app purchases, regardless of the app’s cost. Even though some of them were free, the button was present in all of them. However, this does seem like an improvement over the previous method of being sent to a webpage where you must sign in.
The real question is, will Apple act on these reports? Apple only has 500 human app reviewers, as opposed to Facebook’s 15,000 content moderators, Google’s 20,000 and yes, Twitter’s 2,200 (a company far from the most valuable and profitable in the world). Maybe its automated systems may be able to use the additional information to sound an alarm if a scam app reaches a predefined threshold.
Apple appears to have taken notice of the recent uptick in customer dissatisfaction with the App Store. In addition to a number of other forced compromises in the face of legal and regulatory scrutiny, Apple has just begun allowing consumers to assess the company’s own apps that it bundles with every iPhone. Angry 1-star reviews can be found for anything from Apple Podcasts to the built-in weather app and even the built-in calculator in iOS 12. Apple’s protection from customer scrutiny may not be the most glaring advantage in the App Store, but it’s wonderful to see the business even slightly levelling the playing field.
